Japan's NTT Snaps Up Undersea Cable Co.

Stacey Higginbotham

May. 26, 2009 - 10:00 AM PDT
May. 26, 2009 - 10:00 AM PDT

Japan’s NTT said yesterday that it would spend more than 10 billion yen ($105 million) to buy the owner of a 21,000-kilometer undersea cable delivering web traffic between the U.S. and Japan. NTT said it would buy Pacific Crossing Ltd., which operates the undersea cable offering 3.2 terabits per second of capacity. NTT’s decision to buy the cable can be read as an attempt to control more of the vital infrastructure connecting the web around the world. Earlier this month, we reported on the boom in undersea cable construction in response to a 64 percent surge in international bandwidth use last year. Asia is a huge and growing broadband market, but there is a lot of capacity there.